Sadamasa Motonaga

Sadamasa Motonaga (元永定正, 1922–2011) was one of the most distinctive and internationally visible members of the first generation of the Gutai Art Association. Born in Iga Ueno, Mie Prefecture, on 26 November 1922, he aspired in his youth to become a manga artist, and although he came to fine-art painting by another route, the cartoonist's eye for shape, colour, and humour stayed with him throughout his subsequent painting and printmaking and gave his mature work its characteristic combination of formal rigour and joyful, child-friendly affect.

Motonaga began studying painting under Mankichi Hamabe in the 1940s, and by the early 1950s, after relocating to the Kobe area, he was experimenting with abstract painting and object-making. His work attracted the attention of Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of Gutai, and in 1955 Motonaga joined the Gutai Art Association at Yoshihara's invitation. He remained an active member through 1971, quitting only a few months before the group disbanded in 1972 in the aftermath of Yoshihara's death. Within Gutai he produced some of the movement's best-known ephemeral works, including the water pieces of 1955–56 — vinyl sheets and tubes filled with colour-tinted water suspended in outdoor installations.

In 1966 Motonaga took part in a Japan Society residency program and spent about a year in New York. The American year was decisive for his subsequent style: he returned to Japan with a new sensibility that blended his Gutai-period material experimentation with the visual vocabulary of American hard-edge abstraction and Pop. His mature paintings of the 1970s onward used flat fields of bright, airbrush-applied acrylic in cartoon-derived shapes — ovals, triangles, lines, and irregular biomorphic forms — set against contrasting grounds. The combination is at once rigorously abstract and immediately readable as cheerful, accessible image-making, a tone that informed both his fine-art career and his parallel work as a children's-book illustrator and author.

Printmaking became a substantial part of Motonaga's late output. He worked closely with the Gendai Hanga Center between 1977 and 1984, producing extensive series of silkscreen prints that translated his characteristic shape-vocabulary and airbrush-derived gradients into editioned form, spanning the full range of his late chromatic interests. He was awarded the Grand Prix at the 4th International Biennale Exhibition of Prints in Seoul in 1983, and his prints entered major museum collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Alongside his fine-art career Motonaga published numerous children's picture books, several created from 1970 in collaboration with the poet and translator Shuntarō Tanikawa, which became bestsellers. The picture-book practice was not a sideline but a continuation of the same visual-language project that animated his paintings and prints: bright, accessible shapes that take seriously the perceptual experience of children as much as of adults. He continued making both paintings and prints into his late eighties and died in 2011 at the age of 88.

Within the postwar Japanese print landscape Motonaga occupies a distinctive position as a Gutai painter with a substantial, multi-decade body of editioned graphic work: a large output of silkscreens produced through the Gendai Hanga Center and held in major museum collections. The combination of Gutai foundational training, an American Pop-derived chromatic vocabulary, and traditional Japanese print-publishing infrastructure produced a body of editioned graphic work that bridges the postwar Japanese avant-garde and the international print circuit of the late twentieth century.